Blog Archive - Alliance Housing

Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

Virus Effects on Alliance Housing

Posted on: March 27th, 2020

Thank you to all of you who have reached out to ask how Alliance Housing is weathering the effects of the COVID-19 virus. The short answer is “we’re doing business nearly as normal.” Turns out it’s pretty difficult to fix a toilet or get a furnace running while working virtually. Those of us who are more office-based are still reporting to work. Property management in our world is highly paper and file intensive. Most of those things don’t exist in digital platforms. Our office is small. We have our own space and are all happy to report to work.

The real heroes are Raymond, Craig, Michael and Bob – our caretakers, maintenance and property management staff. They continue to visit tenant homes and building common space to clean, repair and collect rent. They are aware of and practice good hygiene practices. Everyone’s hands are ready to crumble off with extra hand washing. We all healthy and will not endanger tenant’s health if and when we have signs of being ill.

Our real worries are for our tenants. Forty three percent of our tenants work – primarily parttime and low wage hourly ($10-$15) jobs. Others receive social security, disability or some other sort of rent support. They will be less affected. We’re assessing the damage but know many of them have already been laid off or lost hours. We’ve always been in the business of accepting late rent payments and negotiating payment plans. Now will be no different. It just may be delayed a bit longer. Worst case scenario, if 100% of working tenants paid no rent, it amounts to about $25,000 per month. Fortunately, we can weather that for a few months.

If you want to help, we are contemplating a fund that could eventually forgive $1 of rent for each $1 of rent paid. We think this will help immensely because families will be so far behind if they are out of work for 2 or more months, it will be nearly impossible for them ever to catch up. They simply don’t earn sufficient income to ever get ahead. As foundation funds are made available or additional gifts are received from donors through June, we’ll seed and create the fund.

As always, if you have other questions or suggestions, please call or email me at 612-879-7633 or bjeanetta@alliancehousinginc.org.

Alliance is on board with Homes for All MN

Posted on: March 15th, 2018

Where we live impacts every aspect of our lives; the jobs we can access, the education our children receive and the wellbeing of our growing senior population. One’s income and history of credit, housing and convictions effects where we live further – and for some is the reason for their homelessness.

Alliance Housing is one of some 170 organizations who have banded together to ensure:

There are homes for all stages in life,
To allow workers to be more productive and businesses to thrive,
And enable students to achieve in school.

Together, with a similar message, we’ll advocate for $140 million in bonds to create supportive rental housing, preserve housing with existing federal investments, promote homeownership through community land trusts and make improvements to the state’s public housing.

It is these type of bonds that are the basis of funding for Minnehaha Commons – Alliance’s project for adults over 55 years old with a history of homelessness. While we won’t directly benefit from any new appropriation in the next year, we know from talking to people every day and for the 300 some adults and families on our “interest list” that there is a pressing need for more housing options today. It also gives us a network to continue to influence unreasonable screening criteria and get more property owners back to the business of housing people.

Learn more at www.homesforallmn.org. Follow the work on Twitter @Homes4AllMN.

Tenant Profile: Selena

Posted on: December 8th, 2015

Selena has a lot to be proud of. She works full time as a Credit Advisor at Target Corporate, making $15.50 an hour, while raising her son, Sean, who just turned two in November. She graduated from Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana in 2011, has a degree in cosmetology, and moved to Minneapolis in May of 2014. In June 2014, Selena came to our program when she found herself without a home. Although she had experienced homelessness as a child, this was her first time encountering homelessness as an adult. While at the shelter, Selena met Melanie, who works with our Northside Supportive Families Program, and got accepted into the program, working at both Target and the Children’s Place for $8.20 an hour.

Unhappy with the late hours and low wage, Selena left her retail jobs for a position with Wells Fargo. After being with Wells Fargo for six months, she applied for a job with Target Corporate and got accepted to the position she now has, which she loves. Making nearly double what she earned at the start of the program, Selena has been able to pay off $1,000 in debt, while budgeting money to save for a car. She is proud to have raised her credit score, and that she has enough discipline to pay off what debt she still has left. Having the past experience of raising her credit score, she is calm despite recent bumps in the road, knowing that she has the skills needed to manage her money and get back to where she wants to be. She’s also started couponing, and managing her money makes her hopeful that she’ll be sufficient on her own.

One quote Selena goes by is, “think rich, look poor.” As she describes it, “Right now, (living this way), it’s only temporary— save, reach your goals to do what you dream of. Right now you don’t have to buy all of the fancy materials, but live within your means and plan for the future. I’m thinking for the future rather than living rich now. That’s what a lot of people do, I’m trying to do the opposite.”

Although she isn’t currently using her cosmetology degree, she is working on getting licensed in Minnesota so she can have the career she dreams of. She’s proud to be saving and building a cushion of stability through her career at Target, while watching Sean grow up and become “this new person”, a sometimes bossy two year old who loves the word “mine”.

More than anything, Selena is hopeful for stability. “I hope for stability, that’s all I hope for. I just want my kid to be in a good school and for me to be able to provide for the both of us.”

Is Fair Housing Fair?

Posted on: January 7th, 2015

It depends on who you are. Fair housing laws were created in 1968 to make sure landlords treated all potential tenants the same with screening procedures, tenant selection and application fees. HUD hires people to test out fair housing laws and prosecutes those who aren’t treating applicants fairly.

I’d like to challenge the framework of fair housing rules where they are used to screen out certain classes and groups of people based on their criminal, credit and housing history. While past behavior can be a good predictor of future behavior, it doesn’t allow for life circumstances or give someone a second chance to behave differently in the future. I believe that the opportunity to get a second chance should be a cornerstone in the philosophy of all affordable housing developers and managers. We use public dollars to serve people with low incomes, and people who for one reason or another face challenges in securing stable housing, because of a disability, a history of homelessness, or simply a history of poor decisions.

Let me offer a few examples of where I don’t think fair housing is fair. Many affordable housing managers have a list of criminal issues that will screen out various types of felony offenses for a year, or five years, or ten years, or for life. These are persons who have done their time and, in many cases, their probation or parole. Nonetheless, they must continue to “serve time” by being barred from housing opportunities. Police department crime prevention units exacerbate the problem by encouraging landlords to bar former criminals from their rental property.

Let’s say you are someone with a history, ready to turn your life in the right direction. If you are lucky enough to make it past the criminal background check, a landlord will most likely review your credit and housing history. If you’ve been poor, you’ve probably not paid credit cards timely and likely had to give up an apartment because you couldn’t keep up with the rent. Most recently, we’ve seen tenants facing a Catch-22 situation. Potential landlords insist that an applicant pay off a previous landlord for rent delinquencies before they will rent to them. I am sympathetic to some extent; we all want to rent to people that will pay rent on time. But we also know that there are myriad processes, both informal and legal, that a landlord can use to terminate the lease of a tenant delinquent on rent. It should be within the scope of our mission to give someone a second chance, because it is possible to get them to voluntarily or legally move if they don’t.

Public resources to build affordable housing are scarce. Competition to be awarded them is fierce. I think most public funders want to prioritize the most needy. Yet, best practices of property management, including exclusionary tenant screening done in the name of fair housing, encourages just the opposite – excluding the most needy in favor of the least problematic.

Alliance Housing relies on relational property management and has almost no tenant screening criteria. We take referrals from homeless shelters and other social service providers. We house those other landlords screen out. We know our tenants by name, know the ups and downs of their life, and work with them to keep them stably housed. Our mantra, coined by our former Director, Herb Frey, is, “We’ll house you as long as you pay your rent (mostly on time) and behave yourself.” We believe this is our mission. If more landlords lived our mission, it would make many more housing units available without spending the money to build another unit.